This week, I would like to tell you about my recent Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter’s Afternoon Tea experience. I was invited to attend it at the beginning of my hen night celebrations last month. I was accompanied by my 7 of my best friends.

Venue and location:

Mad Hatter’s Afternoon Tea takes place in the luxury, 5* Sanderson’s hotel. It is just situated between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road stations.

Times:

Afternoon Tea is served from 12:30 pm until 4 pm.

Atmosphere:

We were seated in the corner of the restaurant. It was extremely busy, noisy and the service was extremely sluggish so my first impressions weren’t great… I love eating out and I’ve been to hundreds of restaurants before so I was quite surprised by that. We weren’t able to hear any music and to add to our misery their Air-con wasn’t working so it was absolutely boiling inside…

The menu:

Our Mad Hatter’s Afternoon Tea menu was hidden inside a vintage ‘Alice in Wonderland’ book.

As it was a special occasion, we started our experience with a glass of pink Champagne which was lovely and then ordered a few pots of Sanderson-exclusive teas. I decided to have some iced-tea instead as it was boiling inside and unfortunately I had to wait for it to arrive for almost 45 min as our waiter simply forgot about it. When I reminded him about my order he cheekily asked me: ‘Did you order it?’ To which I answered: ‘Yes, from you…’

Moving on, a while after these initial dissatisfactions, we finally received our stand of sweet and savoury treats. They were definitely the highlight of our experience. They were all presented beautifully and they were all very tasty. I am sure that a lot of thought was put into creating these beautiful selection of luxuries.

Our savoury treats included:

• Scottish smoked salmon, quail egg and caviar scotch egg;
• Wiltshire ham and smoked Applewood croquet-monsieur;
• Cornish crab and herb éclair;
• Cucumber and cream cheese sandwich on fresh lime bread.

Our sweet treats included:

• The blue caterpillar;
• Wonderlands magic marshmallow mushrooms;
• Curious carrot meringue;
• The White Rabbit’s pocket watch macaroon;
• Red velvet ladybird;
• Banana bread-and-butterfly;
• The Queen of Hearts Oreo cookie soldier;
• Alice’s drink me potion;
• Scones served with seasonal fruit preserves and Cornish clotted cream.

Dress code:

The dress code at The Sanderson’s hotel is smart casual. I decided to wear my white Coast dress with some Dior sandals.

Overall experience:

Mad Hatter’s Afternoon Tea in Sanderson Hotel offers you a great alternative to a traditional Afternoon Tea. All sweet and savoury treats were amazing and the only let down was the service we received. I would be happy to visit The Sanderson hotel in the future however I hope that they will put their waiting staff through some customer-service training as the service we all received during our visit was simply unacceptable for this beautiful 5* hotel.

Address: The Sanderson, 50 Berners Street, Fitzrovia, London W1

Website: www.sandersonlondon.com

Price: £65 per person excluding service.

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Pauline